Alternative Credit Project™

December 30, 1899

Thumbnail Large 220x146

Image Caption

Page Content

ACE is engaged in an Alternative Credit Project​™​​ to encourage greater acceptance of students’ alternative credit and create a more flexible pathway towards post-secondary education attainment for the more than 32 million non-traditional students who may have some college credit but no degree.

This project is made possible by the generous support of a $1.89 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

About the Project

ACE has engaged over 50 colleges and universities with a strong commitment to access and attainment in an alternative credit consortium. Several of these institutions helped to identify high-demand lower division general education subject areas, agreed-upon quality course and provider criteria, and identified high-quality online education providers across nearly 30 subject areas.

Selected courses have undergone ACE’s credit recommendation process throughout spring 2015, which led to a pool of 111 low-cost and no-cost online courses. Participating institutions agreed to accept many of these courses and visibly communicate their acceptance of the courses to students. Institutions also agreed to provide anonymized data to ACE regarding the amount of credit their institution accepts through this project as well as retention and attainment rates of students transferring in courses from this project.

ACE engaged the marketing and communications firm Stamats, which developed and implemented a strategy and campaign to inform students about these newly available alternative credit courses and the institutions who have agreed to accept these courses for transfer credit.

Other ACE News

University of Maryland Baltimore County President Freeman Hrabowski writes in The Atlantic about his institution’s success on and off the basketball court . . . Dorothy Leland, chancellor of the University of California at Merced, examines possible...

Earning an associate degree prior to transferring to a four-year institution for recent high school graduates neither increased nor decreased their likelihood of completing a bachelor’s degree. But the report suggests prospective transfer students...